Adam Smith Institute Quotes

A direct tax upon the wages of labour, therefore, though the labourer might perhaps pay it out of his hand, could not properly be said to be even advanced by him, at least if the demand for labour and the average price of provisions remained the same after the tax as before it. In all such cases, not only the tax but something more than the tax would in reality be advanced by the person who immediately employed him. ~ Adam Smith

The proprietor of stock is necessarily a citizen of the world, and is not necessarily attached to any particular country. ~ Adam Smith

It must always be remembered, however, that it is the luxuries, and not the necessary expense of the inferior ranks of people, that ought ever to be taxed. ~ Adam Smith

In general, if any branch of trade, or any division of labour, be advantageous to the public, the freer and more general the competition, it will always be the more so. ~ Adam Smith

I refuse to believe that the only reason we are here is to pay taxes and die. ~ Seth Adam Smith

When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so selfish, how comes it that our active principles should often be so generous and so noble? ~ Adam Smith

It rests on the attempt since the 1970s to translate a pathological degeneration of the principle of laissez-faire into economic reality by the systematic retreat of states from any regulation or control of the activities of profit-making enterprise. This attempt to hand over human society to the (allegedly) self-controlling and wealth- or even welfare-maximising market, populated (allegedly) by actors in rational pursuit of their interests, had no precedent in any earlier phase of capitalist development in any developed economy, not even the USA. It was a reductio ad absurdum of what its ideologists read into Adam Smith, as the correspondingly extremist 100% state-planned command economy of the USSR was of what the Bolsheviks read into Marx. ~ Eric Hobsbawm

It was the task of industrial society to destroy all of that. All that "community" implies -- self-sufficiency, mutual aid, morality in the marketplace, stubborn tradition, regulation by custom, organic knowledge instead of mechanistic science -- had to be steadily and systematically disrupted and displaced. All of the practices that kept the individual from being a consumer had to be done away with so that the cogs and wheels of an unfettered machine called "the economy" could operate without interference, influenced merely by invisible hands and inevitable balances and all the rest of that benevolent free-market system guided by what Cobbett called, his lip curled toward Hume and James Steuart and Adam Smith, "Scotch Feelosophy. ~ Kirkpatrick Sale

The natural price, therefore, is, as it were, the central price, to which the prices of all commodities are continually gravitating. ~ Adam Smith

Truth About Love"

I apologize for not being Gandhi or Tom
the mailman who is always kind.

He makes his way every day no matter
the mood of the sky with our words

in a sack and Gandhi made the English
give India back without

taking a gun for a wife. My contribution
to the common good is playing

with the alphabet in a little room
while the world goes foraging

for food. I'm a better poet than man
and it's well known how little

my verbs are worth. I am my only subject,
being the god of my horizons.

What saves me is that just beyond my skin
the world of yours is where

I'd rather live. The AMA says you've added
seven point six years to my life.

In a phrase, love is a transfer of wealth.
This is why Adam Smith gave up

romantic verse. In trying to say what can't
be said I'll take the Dragnet

approach. Just the facts. I'd be dead
sooner without you, you'll die faster

for being a Mrs., raw deal can't be more
clearly defined. To make amends

I offer ten percent more kisses each year.
Or do I do more harm the closer

we become? If yes, leaving would be love
and a better man might. But my thrills

are selfishly domestic. I like sweeping words
into piles and whispering good night. ~ Bob Hicok

The only way to fight the darkness around us is to light a fire within us. ~ Seth Adam Smith

It is unjust that the whole of society should contribute towards an expence of which the benefit is confined to a part of the society. ~ Adam Smith

It appears, accordingly, from the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves. ~ Adam Smith

Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command. It is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of the society which he has in view. But the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily, leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to society ... He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was not part of his intention ~ Adam Smith

Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power. But the person who either acquires, or succeeds to a great fortune, does not necessarily acquire or succeed to any political power, either civil or military. His fortune may, perhaps, afford him the means of acquiring both; but the mere possession of that fortune does not necessarily convey to him either. The power which that possession immediately and directly conveys to him, is the power of purchasing a certain command over all the labour, or over all the produce of labour which is then in the market. His fortune is greater or less, precisely in proportion to the extent of this power, or to the quantity either of other men's labour, or, what is the same thing, of the produce of other men's labour, which it enables him to purchase or command. The exchangeable value of every thing must always be precisely equal to the extent of this power which it conveys to its owner. ~ Adam Smith

The principle which prompts to save is the desire of bettering our conditiona desire which?comes with us from the womb and never leaves us till we go into the grave. ~ Adam Smith

When profit diminishes, merchants are very apt to complain that trade decays; though the diminution of profit is the natural effect of its prosperity, or of a greater stock being employed in it than before. ~ Adam Smith

Abundance in life is achieved only when we tear down walls and fill our lives with light. ~ Seth Adam Smith

Individual Ambition Serves the Common Good. ~ Adam Smith

According, therefore, as this produce, or what is purchased with it, bears a greater or smaller proportion to the number of those who are to consume it, the nation will be better or worse supplied with all the necessaries and conveniencies for which it has occasion. ~ Adam Smith

The uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition ... is frequently powerful enough to maintain the natural progress of things toward improvement, in spite of the extravagance of government, and of the greatest errors of administration. ~ Adam Smith

Faith is the deepest and truest form of magic. ~ Seth Adam Smith

I protest against deference to any man, whether John Stuart Mill, or Adam Smith, or Aristotle, being allowed to check inquiry. Our science has become far too much a stagnant one, in which opinions rather than experience and reason are appealed to. ~ William Stanley Jevons

Market forces have no intrinsically moral direction, which is why, before he wrote The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Ethics should precede economics. But it doesn't have to ... We know this because we've seen the results of capitalism without conscience: the pollution of the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat; the endangerment of workers; and the sale of dangerous products - from cars to toys to drugs. All in pursuit of ever-greater profits. ~ Arianna Huffington

All churches are an echo of this - the Cathedral of Nature. ~ Seth Adam Smith

To superficial minds, the vices of the great seem at all times agreeable. ~ Adam Smith

But they are commonly more distinguished by their superiority in the latter than in the former. Their ~ Adam Smith

Avarice and injustice are always shortsighted, and they did not foresee how much this regulation must obstruct improvement, and thereby hurt in the long-run the real interest of the landlord. ~ Adam Smith

Where does your soul walk? Does it walk in the sunlit woods or hide in the shadowy forest? ~ Seth Adam Smith

This process of taking ownership of my life and circumstances has always been worth the fight. In a quote attributed to author Robert Louis Stevenson, he said: "In each of us, two natures are at war - the good and the evil. All our lives the fight goes on between them, and one of them must conquer. But in our own hands lies the power to choose - what we want most to be, we are. ~ Seth Adam Smith

In lifting another person, we also lift ourselves. ~ Seth Adam Smith

But no moral philosopher, from Aristotle to Aquinas, to John Locke and Adam Smith, divorced economics from a set of moral ends or held the production of wealth to be an end in itself; rather it was seen as a means to the realization of virtue, a means of leading a civilized life. ~ Daniel Bell

If you truly love someone, have the faith to 'let them go.' Encourage them to be the fullest measure of themselves, and you will be overwhelmed by the love that your spouse returns to you. ~ Seth Adam Smith

The world's most successful people didn't wait for someone else to pick them, but instead, they picked themselves. ~ Adam Kirk Smith

People who succeed in business aren't afraid to hear feedback from their customers -- they actually thrive from it. ~ Adam Kirk Smith

Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer. ~ Adam Smith

How sharp a break not only with the recent past but with the whole evolution of Western civilization the modern trend toward socialism means becomes clear if we consider it not merely against the background of the nineteenth century but in a longer historical perspective. We are rapidly abandoning not the views merely of Cobden and Bright, of Adam Smith and Hume, or even of Locke and Milton,5 but one of the salient characteristics of Western civilization as it has grown from the foundations laid by Christianity and the Greeks and Romans. Not merely nineteenth- and eighteenth-century liberalism, but the basic individualism inherited by us from Erasmus and Montaigne, from Cicero and Tacitus, Pericles and Thucydides, is progressively relinquished.6 ~ Friedrich Hayek

Although Adam Smith is today often regarded as a "conservative" figure, he in fact attacked some of the dominant ideas and interests of his own times. Moreover, the idea of a spontaneously self-equilibrating system - the market economy - first developed by the Physiocrats and later made part of the tradition of classical economics by Adam Smith, represented a radically new departure, not only in analysis of social causation but also in seeing a reduced role for political, intellectual, or other elites as guides or controllers of the masses. ~ Thomas Sowell